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Graph of the Day: Minnesota’s Student Poverty Rising
There's a slow wave hitting Minnesota's schools. Gradual, but inexorable, the share of our students coming from lower income backgrounds is growing. This has major repercussions for our schools and is something we need to do a better job preparing for and responding to.
Consider this:
![[ graph: click blog title to view in browser ]](/assets/uploads/article/Slow_But_Steady.png)
(Data from Minnesota Department of Education)
This shows the slowly growing share of Minnesota's student population that receives free or reduced price lunch through the National School Lunch program. While the growth has been slow, it has been fairly consistent, and the bulk of the growth is students receiving free lunch (i.e. students worse off than those receiving reduced price lunch).
There's a small spike after the Great Recession hit, but even before then Minnesota's schools saw a slow but continuous increase in the percentage of students in poverty. This doesn't appear directly connected to separate trends in overall student enrollment, which has dipped and recovered somewhat during the same time period. At this rate, we're likely to break 40% of students in poverty around the 2014-15 school year. That's two years away.
What does this mean for Minnesota's schools? We know that socioeconomic status is the single largest factor affecting student performance. This is tied to many things—early childhood experiences, summer learning opportunities, access to health care, life stress, and others—that can accelerate or interfere with the learning opportunities provided in the traditional K-12 school system.
If we want to avoid future losses in Minnesota's overall academic performance, we need to take steps to respond to and eventually reverse this trend. That means investing in high-quality early childhood programs, using schools as points of delivery for health care and other social services to low-income families, and trying to stabilize the composition, quality, and workplaces of our teaching corps.
Minnesota's situation is not yet as desperate as many other states, and progressives should lead the charge to keep us off this path.
Posted in Education | Related Topics: Economic Recovery Achievement Gap Early Childhood Education Poverty
3 Comments
June 29, 2012 at 8:26 am
Government programs have made a whole new generation dependent on the government. Head Start isn’t making a difference and those on Free/reduced lunch isn’t making a difference in their academic performance (generalizing here, there are always exceptions). Cradle to grave liberals don’t have a problem with this because there is always a rich Republican or Libertarian to blame. I would love to see the trend on this graph go down, but a lot of poverty (and the problems surrounding those in poverty) starts with breakdown of the traditional family. No more babies having babies and throttle back divorce rates.
June 22, 2012 at 11:23 am
This is not the vision most Minnesotans have for the state. Minnesota used to be the state that works, it used to be known for its educational prominence, it used to be known as a state people and companies wanted to move to.
Young people in poverty become adults in poverty, and so do their children. There aren’t any bootstraps for these people; they have been pretty well shredded. They do not get the opportunity to do things—like get an education—that will give them a chance to change their status. If they get through high school, most cannot afford today’s tuition rates and other expenses.
We need to make education affordable—really affordable—for everyone. We could make education free, and I think that’s what we should do.
We see “dumbing down” all over America. Is that part of the idea—keep people dumb and ignorant, feed them Faux news and nasty ads day after day? I think so.
Maybe our elected officials don’t want their constituents better educated than they are—they set a low bar.
Ginny says:
June 29, 2012 at 11:48 am
Government programs have made a whole new generation (actually a couple of generations) of corporations and businesses dependent on government in the form of tax breaks and tax cuts, subsidies (see oil and gas, among others), and various special deals for businesses like allowing tax breaks for putting jobs overseas. And we have allowed it because we keep electing people who are beholden to corporate interests.
We need to make this a much bigger issue than it is and get rid of the unfairness.
The subsidies for the poor are small potatoes compared to these dependencies. The corporate coddling has a much bigger effect on our economy in terms of giving the rich even more money and making our wealth gap even greater than ever. We are now 2nd in the world in this gap.
I doubt M has any real, objective evidence for such assertions about Head Start and all. All I’ve ever seen is how much it saves us in the long run.